Moving Forward

Our original plan was to wait 3 years for the housing market to recover before selling our house.  We gave it some serious thought and realized that we'd be pumping tons of money into the house and 99% of it would go down the drain as interest.  If we could sell the house now and get enough out of it to pay off the 1st and 2nd and some of the other debt we've piled up, then we could be putting all that extra monthly income into investments and paying down the boat.  Right now, the stock market is doing a whole lot better than the housing market.  It's a good chance that we'd get a better return for our money than if we waited 3 years to sell the house.

So, we talked to our friend, Thomas Powers, the real estate dude.  He came by and looked things over and gave us what he felt was a realistic number that we could get for the house right now.  It was higher than I had hoped for so we decided to put the house on the market next month and see how it goes.  We're in a good position, where we don't have to sell if we don't want to.  We can stick to our guns on the price and not worry about scaring off a buyer.  If the house sells then that's great.  If not, then we'll take it off the market for a while and try again later.

For now, we're trying to get the house ready to show.  We looked into putting some stuff into storage and calculated the cost of that over 15 years, the amount of time we plan to be on the boat.  Definitely NOT worth it.  We're planning to sell everything eventually except maybe a few family heirloom kinda things.  We've started listing stuff on Ebay and Craigslist and we're having a ball.  Once you make the decision to go all the way you lose the feeling of "I'm gonna need this some day".  Nothing is sacred, everything must go.  Cheri is parting with a lot of her sewing gear, although some will go to the boat.  I'm tearing down my train layout that was just getting started.  I've listed all the train stuff except some kits that I'll keep as projects for when we're underway.  Clothes that haven't been worn during the last year are gone.  Most of my tools will go on the block.  The motorcycles are for sale.  All the furniture is going into a catalog with photos and prices.  We'll set it out during an open house and hope that someone will be interested.  We need to hang onto most of it until the house sells so it can be used to "stage" the house.  Not only that but we might not be able to sell the house right away and then we'd have this empty shell.  We plan to use some of it, like the home theater stuff, as an enticement for buying the house.

We still plan to move aboard in April.  We now have about 2 and a half months to get the boat finished.  I figure we have 168 hours per week.  About 48 hours will be spent at work.  It'll probably rain or snow for half the time, about 84 hours.  We'll need 4 hours just to drive to Rock Hall and back.  Not to mention 56 hours for sleep.  This comes to 192 hours per week.  I think we might have a problem here.  John Hellwege at Gratitude Yachts told me yesterday that all the woodwork down below is finished and they're almost done replacing all the hoses on the boat.  At least someone's making progress.

We're replacing the hoses for two reasons.  One, they're almost 10 years old and hoses have a habit of getting stinky after about 10 years.  In sea water there's these tiny critters that collect on the inner walls of the hoses and form something like a calcium buildup.  It can eventually restrict the flow but worse still is the smell of this stuff when it's exposed to air.  Yuck!  It seeps into the hose and can be smelled throughout the boat.  It can be cleaned out by removing the hoses and banging them against a piling or something to get the buildup out, then rinsing them out with a strong solution of water and vinegar.  Or you can put in new hoses which is probably way more effective in the long run.  Which brings me to the second reason for replacing the hoses.  These things are threaded throughout the boat, behind cabinets, beneath the cabin sole, through bulkheads.  They are a real bear to replace.  We tied the cost of having it done by Gratitude along with a bunch of other work we were having done to make the boat nice enough to live aboard.  Now when we go down below the woodwork will be all beautiful and everything will smell clean.  This is a far cry from the way it was when we first looked at the boat last Summer.  Things are really coming along.

Ya know, it seems kinda goofy, but we've had the boat for 4 months now and the only time we've been underway on her was for about 2 hours last September during sea trials.  By the time we get her back in the water it will have been 7 and a half months and we'll just be getting to sail her for the first time.  That is gonna be so cool.  And it's getting close.